Members of the Hatfield Township community place a high value on locally sourced and organic foods and environmental stewardship. As such, planning for the town’s new ShopRite supermarket included making sustainability a priority from product offerings to construction of the store itself — including the choice of refrigeration systems and display cases.
Minimizing frost accumulations on refrigerator evaporator coils and fins, the Ice*Meister™ Model 9734-REFR optical defrost controller can be used in commercial walk-in refrigerators and reach-in refrigerated display cases, and other self-defrosting chiller systems in supermarkets, restaurants, school cafeterias, and more.
In late 2010, Sprouts Farmers Market set out to meet the EPA’s most stringent GreenChill standards with construction of its Thousand Oaks, Calif., store. Sprouts tapped Hill Phoenix to design a refrigeration system that not only would be environmentally friendly, but also energy efficient and cost effective to install and maintain.
Empirical testing has shown that the optimum time to defrost is when the evaporator loses about 10 percent efficiency. Traditional methods of defrost, based on time, cannot ascertain this loss of efficiency and will either waste time and energy in excessive defrosting, or never fully defrost the evaporator.
As new stores are built and older systems in existing stores replaced, an approach called secondary refrigeration is gaining wider acceptance and is steadily increasing in numbers.
Centralized refrigeration systems have been in use for years. Distributed systems, on the other hand, are one of the newer commercially adopted refrigeration technologies.
It is one thing to install efficiently running refrigeration equipment. But it also has to be energy efficient - according to a wide range of standards. That’s why Emerson recently issued a white paper called Status of Energy Regulations for Commercial Refrigeration Equipment.
When a refrigeration system fails, many times the cause can easily be diagnosed. However there are occasions when the cause cannot easily be determined - either the true cause is unclear or the technician is unsure of a problem. How do you work through these jobs? One method used by some techs is to “read and record.”